Flip1948 is correct in his comment about the AP fact check column... I am reprinting the AP's assessment here.


WHO health regulations don’t infringe on US decision-making
By SOPHIA TULP
May 18, 2022
Some social media users are falsely claiming that the Biden administration is proposing amendments to the WHO's International Health Regulations that would t***sfer U.S. sovereign authority over health policy decisions to the organization's director-general.

CLAIM: The Biden administration is proposing amendments to the World Health Organization’s International Health Regulations that would t***sfer U.S. sovereign authority over health care decisions to the WHO director-general.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The International Health Regulations, which are aimed at detecting disease outbreaks, allow the WHO director-general to declare a public health emergency of international concern. The proposed U.S. amendments seek to strengthen requirements for reporting such emergencies. Member countries agree to abide by the guidelines, but the WHO does not have the power to enforce them, nor can it interfere in other countries’ decision-making processes, according to experts.

THE FACTS: As the World Health Organization prepares to host its 75th World Health Assembly this weekend, in which delegates from 194 member states convene to agree on the organization’s priorities and policies, some social media users are misrepresenting proposals the U.S. is bringing to the conference.

Following the C****-** p******c, the U.S. has drafted a series of amendments to a legal framework called the International Health Regulations. The IHR defines countries’ rights and obligations in handling public health emergencies that have the potential to cross borders. It was last amended in 2005 after the global SARS epidemic. The U.S. amendments now call for greater accountability and t***sparency in reporting and responding to such emergencies.

But some remarks, including those by former U.S. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, bloggers and conservative political pundits, among others, are misrepresenting the U.S. proposals to falsely claim they would take health policy decision-making powers away from U.S. officials and grant unilateral authority to the WHO’s director-general.

“These amendments would t***sfer our health care decision-making out of U.S. hands, into the hands of the director-general of the WHO,” said Bachmann, a former congresswoman from Minnesota, while calling into a conservative radio show on Thursday. The segment was posted on Facebook, where it was viewed more than 32,000 times. She also repeated the claims during another interview that was posted on Twitter.

Bachmann went on to suggest that the same amendments would allow the director-general to “order all sorts of radical edicts,” including imposing global lockdowns, v*****e mandates and business closures, as well as force c*****e c****e policy and even gun control measures on member nations. Bachmann did not respond to a request for comment.

Experts familiar with the International Health Regulations say these assertions are misleading, and the idea that the director-general could impose enforceable mandates on other countries is unfounded.

Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University law professor and director of the university’s WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, told The Associated Press that the director-general only has the power to make recommendations, not enact laws or otherwise dictate national policy decisions.

“It is utterly untrue that the IHR would interfere with health care decisions or t***sfer such decisions to the WHO Director-General,” Gostin wrote in an email. “The IHR amendments would ask countries to promptly and t***hfully report infectious disease outbreaks, and WHO would offer assistance in managing the outbreak. But it could not force a country to allow WHO staff to interfere with its public health decision making.”

Gostin, who also helped write the 2005 version of the IHR, cited China as an example. China signed the IHR, but violated it during the p******c by delaying reporting of the initial C****-** outbreak and later pushing back against the WHO investigation into its origins.

Gostin and other experts say the amendments seek to prevent this from happening.

The U.S. amendments to the IHR tighten requirements for reporting information to the WHO surrounding public health emergencies of international concern. They ask the WHO to develop early warning criteria for assessing, updating and communicating risks posed by such emergencies. They also modify the guidelines surrounding investigations and assistance in such instances. In the past, countries could refuse to cooperate with the WHO’s expert teams. Now, the amendments seek to have all signatories agree not to block such actions.

The amendments also seek to allow a committee to assess member countries’ compliance with the framework, though they do not ascribe any specific punishments or legal consequences for those that don’t.

Dr. David Freedman, the president-elect of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, served on a WHO committee of IHR experts for a decade. He reiterated that the WHO “has zero enforcement, police or punitive powers.”

“They can’t sanction a country, they can just say ‘hey you signed this treaty, you’re supposed to abide by this treaty,’” said Freedman.

Further, the IHR is mostly focused on preventing the spread of infectious diseases and p******cs, the experts said. C*****e c****e, gun control or even specific measures like v******tions or lockdowns are not mentioned.

“It’s pretty obvious, I don’t think there’s anything hidden in the language that they’ve inserted,” Freedman added. “These immediate changes clearly are only reflective of disease outbreaks.”

Some social media users are also conflating the IHR with a separate effort the WHO has launched to develop a global accord on p******c prevention and response. That accord is different from the IHR and is still being drafted. Experts told the AP there’s no evidence that the accord would cede any national decision-making power, either.

WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus addressed some of the misinformation during a media briefing Tuesday.

“Unfortunately, there has been a small minority of groups making misleading statements and purposefully distorting facts,” Ghebreyesus said, clarifying that the World Health Assembly does not override member nations’ sovereignty.

“WHO is an expression of Member States’ own sovereignty and WHO is entirely what the sovereign 194 Member States want WHO to be,” he added.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.

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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.

Why do Democrats H**e America and why in the world do they have confidence on globalism, the UN, and worst of all The WHO?

Biden Moves To Cede Sovereignty to WHO

By Jenny Beth MartinMay 21, 2022

American sovereignty will be on the line next week, and most Americans aren’t even aware of it. If they were, they’d be raising a ruckus – which, of course, is precisely why the Biden administration has done its best to keep its actions hidden from as many as possible for as long as possible.

In early January, the Biden administration sent the global bureaucrats at the World Health Organization a set of proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations to be considered by the World Health Assembly at United Nations headquarters during their gathering in May. Representatives from almost 200 countries will gather there to consider these proposed amendments, each of which does one of two things – either it gives WHO more power, or it reduces the member nations’ rights to make their own decisions.

In other words, these amendments move power and control from America’s government (which derives its just powers from the consent of the governed) to an international body of bureaucrats (for which no American citizen v**ed).

To borrow from Yogi Berra: If our Founding Fathers were alive today, they’d be rolling over in their graves.

The very first document that can truly be called “American” is our Declaration of Independence, in which our Founding Fathers explained the reasoning behind their decision to break from the mother country. These men claimed, at the very beginning of that document, the right “to assume among the power of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them …”

That sentence was their declaration of sovereignty. The new country they proclaimed in that document was entitled to be treated the same as every other country on the planet, with all the same rights and privileges – in their words, “as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”

But now come the radical extremists who populate the Biden administration. Their vision is different from the Founders’ vision. Based on the amendments they’ve proposed, they don’t seem to care about protecting America’s sovereignty.

Rep. Chris Smith, the ranking member of the House Global Health Subcommittee, explains: “The alarming amendments offered by the Biden Administration to the WHO’s International Health Regulations would grant new unilateral authority to [WHO] Director-General Tedros to declare a public health crisis in the United States or other sovereign nations, without any consultation with the U.S. or any other WHO member. Specifically, the Biden Amendment would strike the current regulation that requires the WHO to ‘consult with and attempt to obtain verification from the State Party in whose territory the event is allegedly occurring in,’ ceding the United States’ ability to declare and respond to an infectious disease outbreak within the United States, dependent on the judgment of a corrupt and complicit UN bureaucracy.”

To make matters even worse, the body of international bureaucrats the Biden administration is preparing to cede power to isn’t just any band of international bureaucrats, it’s the very same band of international bureaucrats whose performance during the p******c was outrageously bad. WHO covered for the Chinese C*******t Party by tweeting in the early days of the p******c that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human t***smission of the novel c****av***s,” even though the CCP leadership knew this was false, and then dismissing the possibility that the novel c****av***s was developed in a laboratory in W***n.

Why in the world is the Biden administration yielding power to these people?

And that’s not all. The proposed amendments aren’t the end of the story, but the beginning. Last December, the World Health Assembly launched an effort to draft a new “international p******c preparedness” treaty, which would likely give these international health bureaucrats even more power. That treaty isn’t scheduled to be ready until 2024. If these amendments to the International Health Regulations are any indication, that treaty is going to be even worse.

The Biden administration is hoping that an America distracted by raging inflation, rising crime, a growing crisis on our southern border, a baby formula shortage, a pending decision by the Supreme Court on a crucial a******n case, and all the other challenges we are currently experiencing will not notice their attempt to cede U.S. sovereignty in Geneva.